Abstract
Heritable symbionts have diverse effects on the physiology, reproduction and fitness of their hosts. Maternally transmitted Wolbachia are one of the most common endosymbionts in nature, infecting about half of all insect species. We test the hypothesis that Wolbachia alter host behaviour by assessing the effects of 14 different Wolbachia strains on the locomotor activity of nine Drosophila host species. We find that Wolbachia alter the activity of six different host genotypes, including all hosts in our assay infected with wRi-like Wolbachia strains (wRi, wSuz and wAur), which have rapidly spread among Drosophila species in about the last 14 000 years. While Wolbachia effects on host activity were common, the direction of these effects varied unpredictably and sometimes depended on host sex. We hypothesize that the prominent effects of wRi-like Wolbachia may be explained by patterns of Wolbachia titre and localization within host somatic tissues, particularly in the central nervous system. Our findings support the view that Wolbachia have wide-ranging effects on host behaviour. The fitness consequences of these behavioural modifications are important for understanding the evolution of host-symbiont interactions, including how Wolbachia spread within host populations.
| Original language | English |
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| Article number | 20210052 |
| Journal | Biology Letters |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - May 2021 |
Funding
Data accessibility. All data and code are available on Dryad (https://doi. org/10.5061/dryad.6t1g1jwxv) [104]. Newly reported genome assemblies are available on GenBank (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih. gov/bioproject/PRJNA717279). Authors’ contributions. M.T.J.H. and B.S.C. conceived of the study. M.T.J.H. conducted the experiments, analysed the data, and drafted the manuscript. M.T.J.H., H.A.W. and B.S.C. designed the experiments, edited the manuscript, and approved the final version. B.S.C. coordinated the study. All authors agree to be held accountable for the content therein. Competing interests. We declare we have no competing interests. Funding. This work was supported by the NIH under award R35GM124701 to B.S.C. Acknowledgements. We thank Tim Wheeler for laboratory assistance and Will Conner for help with bioinformatic analyses. We thank the Cooper lab group for comments that improved the manuscript.
| Funder number |
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| R35GM124701 |
Keywords
- Drosophila
- host-microbe interaction
- locomotion
- symbiosis
- wMel